Faith & Spirit Quote by Johnny Rivers

There’s a particular kind of mid-career honesty in Johnny Rivers admitting he “took off for awhile,” as if retreat were just another stop on the tour map. The line lands because it’s casual, almost tossed-off, yet it quietly rewrites a familiar rock narrative: not the tragic crash, not the mythic comeback, but the deliberate step back after a business decision (“after I sold Soul City”) that likely changed his relationship to music.

“Soul City” isn’t just a place name; it’s a marker of ambition. Rivers wasn’t only a performer riding the 60s wave with radio-ready hits, he was dabbling in infrastructure - label-building, talent-wrangling, the messy work of turning a moment into a machine. Selling it suggests both an exit and a reckoning: either the dream got too expensive, too political, or simply too exhausting. When he says he “didn’t do too many gigs,” the understatement is the point. It signals burnout without begging for sympathy, and it frames absence as choice rather than decline.

Placed against the post-1970 music industry - FM album culture taking over, tastes hardening, the business getting more corporate - Rivers’ pause reads like quiet resistance. The subtext is that constant visibility is not the same thing as relevance, and that sometimes the most truthful move an artist can make is to stop feeding the treadmill. The sentence carries the unglamorous reality behind a glossy era: even the hitmakers need to disappear to stay themselves.